Yesterday, Reuters released an article about Wellpoint’s profit making practice of targeting women with breast cancer. Reducing the lives and well-being of women to a math problem, one of the insurance companies with the worst records of putting people before profit has been using an algorithm to find women who have recently been diagnosed with breast cancer to deny their coverage, according to the article.

After all the phone calls, the rallies, and the voices raised to fight for health care reform, we are now faced with the reality that insurance companies plan to run wild to the very last minute. This means that many women may not live to see the benefits of our new hard-fought law. Though it is understandable that the health care reform law will take many years to implement and still many more years to perfect, it is hardly acceptable to believe that in the interim women should be subjected to continued discrimination and targeting by profit-hungry insurance companies.

The article provides a sad reminder of why passing a health care reform law was essential for millions of Americans in this country. And it is an important cautionary tale about how vital it is for us to properly implement the new law so that stories like these will be relics of our broken system.